The reality of war games

People look at poppy wreaths after remembrance ceremonies to mark the centenary of the end of World War I in London on Monday

Sport was a just ruse to boost enlistment and soldiers’ spirits during World War I. Though we like to pretend otherwise, conflicts are not games

"The word ‘machine’ was not yet invariably coupled with ‘gun’," writes the historian Paul Fussell of that time, now 104 years in the past, before a long and unprecedented conflict engulfed so many nations and people — India and Pakistan included — that it came to be known as a world war; as a Great War, which concluded a hundred years ago this week.

The words ‘war’ and ‘sport’, however, still had interchangeable meanings before the battles began. They had been for generations. The Christmas Truce of 1914, in which British and German foot soldiers laid down their weapons to celebrate Christmas for a day, is a legend whose power only grows in successive years. Historians have long tried to separate myth from fact on that score: the most recent knowledge we have is that some kickabouts were definitely held at the frontline, without official sanction. In other words, England and Germany did not lay down arms. A bunch of weary, hungry, cold soldiers took a mutinous temporary respite from reality.

We’re so different from the people who preceded us by a century, and World War I itself had such a huge role to play in this historical break, that it’s difficult to believe that soldiers facing annihilation would pause for a football game because it was Christmas. How much more ridiculous, then, to imagine English officers kicking a football towards the enemy lines as they advanced against the enemy? They did so: precisely and repeatedly. One Captain WR Nevill took four footballs to the battle of the Somme, having them booted over the line to encourage his soldiers, making it seem like they were charging into agame. (He was killed instantly.)

I say “historical break” like these confusions of meaning didn’t just occur in Europe, but to all of us and our ancestors. One reason, of course, is that whatever irrevocably changed European nations irrevocably changed their colonised subjects. The other reason is that we — by which I mean Indians, along with brown and black folks of many other nationalities — were there; hundreds of thousands of our forebears fought these wars.

So it wasn’t only the officer class, or even native Europeans, who had to go to war like they were playing a game, and play games like their lives depended on it. George Morton-Jack’s new book, The Indian Empire At War, describes how imperial troops from the subcontinent were trained to participate in regimental sports — from football and cricket to swimming and roller skating, “all to bring on their physical fitness and feel for teamwork”.

All these sports had long since been exported to India and were played by British and Indian elites in the empire and the princely states. But the war meant that hundreds, perhaps thousands of ordinary Indian men learned them for the first time. In some circumstances, they played them on equal terms with white men. Further into the war, the Indian Soldiers Fund was sending bats and balls to Hindustani troops along with coffee and cigars. In Turkey, they sometimes played sports tournaments organised for prize money. There was even time for football and swimming in a German POW camp in Romania.

People like to say that we fight wars for freedom. They also like to say that we play sports to express our freedom. Neither of those statements are universally true. Neither of them were remotely true in World War I. The British propaganda office recruited sports players, including many footballers, into the army in order to encourage enlistment and raise soldiers’ spirits. They hosted matches; they laughed at Pashtun soldiers taking to cricket because it was a “man-to-man duel” in which they could hurt each other. The implied contrast was to the British upper classes, who would never treat cricket as anything quite so lurid.

This was true: the British imperial classes only thought of cricket as preparation for public schoolboys who would grow up and control vast foreign lands, becoming managers of the world’s most unjust markets. Cricket would inculcate in these boys the desire for control — the greed and pride with which their elders had embarked upon this war — and enable them to fight future wars. “Play up, play up! And play the game,” the famous poem that compared the cricket field to the field of war went. The poet who wrote that was the best friend of Douglas Haig, the British commander of the western front.

Never again, they started to say after World War I, embarking on a campaign of prolonged irony that persists in many parts of the world even today. Drones now carpet-bomb distant targets the way gamers can pick off imaginary enemies with joysticks and keyboards. Even Indian cricketers expect the sort of unquestioning respect that traditional societies reserve for soldiers (“If you don’t like Indian batsmen, why don’t you go live somewhere else?”). We know wars aren’t games. We still like to pretend otherwise.

█ SUPRIYA NAIR The halfway line: on the intersection of sports and life

█ British imperial classes thought of cricket as preparation for managing the world’s most unfairly acquired markets

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